


What is that song you sing for the dead?

by Teatrolley



Series: season of hope (after the flood) [2]
Category: SKAM (Norway)
Genre: Character Study, Even's suicide attempt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, pov mikael øverlie boukhal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 02:30:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12596136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: Mikael meets Even the first time in the Bakka cafeteria. They become best friends.Two years later Even tries to kill himself.____Or: Even's suicide attempt and the aftermath. From Mikael's POV





	What is that song you sing for the dead?

**Author's Note:**

> i just can't stop thinking about mikael's pov in all of this, apparently
> 
> nothing graphic about the sa is described but be cautious of the subject before reading, anyway
> 
> title from sufjan steven's death with dignity from the album carrie and lowell, an amazing record that talks about grief far better than this does

Mikael meets Even the first time in the Bakka cafeteria.

It’s Elias and Yousef who he shares a class with and, thus, Elias who brings him to the cafeteria to meet his old, childhood friend Mutta, and Mutta’s other new friends, Adam and, you guessed it: Even. He’s white and not Muslim and, if Mikael is completely honest, in that first moment of seeing him, he doesn’t think he’s going to last long.

That’s before he starts talking.

It takes them a few more days of cafeteria-meetings before, one day, they find out that they’re both going to be off later than everyone else, and Even says, “Meet up after?” Mikael nods and, before going home that night, he’s already hoping that this guy is going to be a part of him for the rest of his life.

He’s so vivid, is the thing. Vivid and funny, quick-witted and charming. He likes all the same things that Mikael likes, which has never happened before, and when he’s not matching Mikael’s passion for those things, he’s exceeding it. He sweeps everyone along in his enthusiasm and Mikael is, almost immediately, infatuated with him.

He’s already liked his first boy at this point, a dark-skinned, Muslim kid in eight grade who looked good laughing, so that’s not the surprising part. The only surprising thing about it is how quickly it happens.

Of course, he doesn’t say anything about it. They’re a whole group of people, is one thing, and in-group rejection will change a dynamic like that. Even is already dating someone, is another, a girlfriend who he’s had for years already and who he’s clearly in love with. She’s funny, and smart, and Mikael is not even that jealous because, really, he understands. How can you know Even and not love him?

So, he doesn’t say anything and, honestly, it’s not even that heart-breaking. He gets to have Even in his life, doesn’t he, and Even is a good friend. Whenever they’re around each other, which is often, they have a good time and, more often than not, he forgets about any of the sad parts. Crushes are fun, either way, and if he’s going to come to terms with feeling things for boys by doing it, he really couldn’t have found a better guy to do it with than Even who, he’s sure, wouldn’t mind too much if he ever found out.

It doesn’t go away, the crush, but Mikael doesn’t really mind that too much either. When he’s eighteen he’s resigned himself to the fact that, most likely, he’ll always feel some resemblance of this but that, despite that, the sensible thing would probably be to try to move on. So he does. 

He lets himself look at other boys and, occasionally, thinks them pretty. He starts to devise a plan for coming out to the guys and, in a moment of convincing himself it won’t mean anything, asks Even to be the subject of this interview he has to do, for class. Then films him talking about this stupid, silly movie that he’s so passionate about Mikael is sure anyone would want to kiss him for it.

It’s not until much later that he learns to pay attention to the part where Even says, _the main character must die. Otherwise the love story isn’t epic_ , but when he learns it, he learns it hard.

It feels like it’s the sort of thing that should happen immediately after, but it doesn’t. It takes about a year. It takes about a year, but then it happens: 

Even kisses him. 

Even kisses him and then, eight days later later, just like the story predicted it, he tries to take his own life.

*

The first thing Mikael talks about with his mum, when he talks to her about religion, is life after death.

“Most Muslims believe there’s a Paradise,” she says.

She doesn’t mention any other options, because he’s seven, and she’s always been good at knowing what’s age-appropriate to say. Later he’s twelve, and watching people dying on the news and, that night, she tells him about the sacredness of a life. And he’s twelve, and he loves movies, even then, and he’s seen enough of them to know to ask what happens if you take one.

“You don’t go to Paradise,” she says.

“What if it’s an accident?” he asks.

“Even then.”

“What if it’s your own?”

Looking back later, he thinks he scares her with the question. He’s a twelve-year-old boy, carefree still, but parents don’t know their kids as well as they think, as he’s sure she’s always known, and the worst nightmare of a parent, she tells him later, is to have overlooked your child’s pain. But he’s just curious, which is not the same as being troubled. And he’s not in pain.

At least not yet.

"If it's your own that's the worst sin you can commit," she says, and it's not until much later that he starts to wonder how on earth, then, he's going to save Even's soul.

*

In the days after Even’s suicide attempt he’s angrier than he can remember ever being, and angrier than he thinks he ever will be again. He’s _so_ angry. So angry he can’t even _think_ , let alone function like a normal human being. He wants to break things all the time and, on a few occasions, he does. Glasses and plates and pillows but never anything on his own body because _you don’t do that to people, you horrible, fucking asshole, Even. You don’t do that to other people._

He doesn’t remember the first night after it happens at all, but the second one he stays up all night, practising what he would have said at the funeral, and wondering if he’d have even been there and whether he, if Even had succeeded, would have been this angry, too.

The third day he sits around the dinner table at Elias’s house with the rest of the boys (Not true. Not the rest of the boys. One of them is missing), staring blankly at the patterns in the wood of the table, when Elias says, “We should go see him at the hospital.”

It makes Mikael want to scream.

“Why?” he says. “He doesn’t want us to.”

“Come on,” Mutta says, and for the first time in his life Mikael wants to punch him in the face. Wants to draw first blood and have the rest of them tackling him away, and wants to listen to them try and get him to apologise and refuse because none of them can understand this. None of them get it.

“Come on what?” he says. “He doesn’t. He doesn’t even care enough to pick up when we call.”

“Sonja says he’s depressed,” Yousef says, and Mikael hates him, too, sweet, sensible him who has the audacity to not even look like he’s broken.

“Fuck off,” he says. Everyone looks at him.

“He’s your best friend,” Elias says.

“Is he? Huh? Is that what he is?” Mikael laughs, humourlessly. “Is _this_ what best friends do?”

Mutta rolls his eyes. “You’re being kind of an asshole, do you know that?” he says.

“Oh,” Mikael says, laughing again, still without humour. What does Mutta know about being an asshole? What does Mutta know about pain? Nothing, because he knows nothing of love. Not the way Mikael does. “You go see him then,” he says. “I’m not coming.”

“Oh, great.”

“Mikael, come on,” Elias tries, and Mikael fucking hates the diplomatic tone of his voice, hates the whole lot of them. “We can’t let this break us.”

“As if we have a fucking choice–”

“Why do you think you’re the only one who’s in pain?” Mutta says.

“He kissed _me_.”

“I taught him how to read the Quran,” Yousef says.

“Both of you, shut up,” Elias says. “No one’s to blame here.”

“Yes,” Mikael says, clenching his jaw. “Even is.”

“He’s sick, goddammit,” Mutta says, looking just about ready to punch Mikael, exactly as Mikael wants him to. “He’s _sick_ –”

“He could have asked for help!” Mikael yells, for the first time, and then:

He didn’t cry when he heard. And he didn’t cry last night, when he imagined the funeral, and he hasn’t cried at any point, yet, but now: Now he breaks down, sobbing into his hands, and he can’t breathe, he can’t fucking breathe, he–

“Mikael,” Yousef says, and touches his back, but Mikael shakes him off.

“Don’t touch me,” he says, and Yousef pulls his hand away.

The last of the boys who hugged him was Even. He doesn’t want anyone else to touch him ever again. Maybe they sense it. At least no one else tries. They just sit with him, in silence, as he sobs and sobs and sobs.

Even is his best friend, his _best friend_ , and the last time Mikael saw him they were kissing and it was surprising to him but he liked it and it felt good and it felt like everything he’d ever wanted it to and–

“I love him,” he says, and it makes him sob even louder than before. “I’m in love with him.”

It’s the first time he says it out loud. Across from him, he hears someone else start crying, too. Other than that, it’s silent.

“I’m in love with him, but kissing me made him want to die.”

A chair across from him screeches across the floorboards as someone leaves the table. A moment later, Yousef does, too, and then someone else sits down next to him, touching his shoulder and, this time, Mikael lets them.

“It’s not fair,” he says. When he looks up, it’s Adam and Yousef who’s left, and Mutta who’s sitting next to him. Elias is sitting across from him, crying silently. Mutta is just silent. “It’s not fair of him to do this to me.”

Elias presses his lips together firmly as his shoulders shake and the tears keep falling. Mutta hides his face in his free hand. His shoulders are shaking, too, but he doesn’t say anything. Not this time.

The moment he stops crying the anger is back. He clenches his jaw, grinds his teeth, and is back to anger.

“I’m not going,” he says, and is surprised at the determination in his own voice. “The rest of you can do whatever the fuck you want, but I’m not going.”

He means it because, right now, he hates Even. And he hates the rest of them, too. Fucking loathes them for not understanding, and loathes them for actually understanding, too. Loathes it so much he wants to punch him, again, when Mutta just looks at him, silently, and nods.

“Okay,” he says.

Mikael doesn’t like pity, and he doesn’t like them, and he doesn’t like anything.

He gets up off his chair and leaves without saying a single word of goodbye.

*

The world goes on all around him. It keeps going on, and he watches it, without taking part. He sits on the tram and watches other people laughing, he helps when Mutta’s parents move house. He graduates.

His brother has a baby.

It’s like his whole body is grief, those first few months. Not everything he feels is that, but everything he feels comes back to it, eventually, in the evening when he’s left alone. But then, one late night, his phone rings, and an hour or so later he’s an uncle.

He doesn’t cry holding him, the little baby boy, not at first. Not until he reaches up, tiny little fist searching for his face, and then he does, ugly and snotty and, somehow, filled with laughter, too. It shouldn’t make sense that something as beautiful as this can exist in a world as bleak as Mikael’s seems, now, but it does.

“I love you,” he says, to the little being in his arms, and he doesn’t even know him yet, but it’s truer than anything else he’s ever felt.

It doesn’t push the grief away but it exists, too, and that’s worth something as well. It exists, too.

*

The first time he sees Even again about a year and a half has passed and Even’s new boyfriend is hitting him in the face.

After he first cries with the boys, he doesn’t stop. He cries at the dinner table, and in school, and in the shower. He cries in his bed at night, tears streaming down to his ears, and he doesn’t know how to stop it, so he doesn’t, but he does go back to the basket court where Even kissed him, sitting under the night sky and crying there, too. With the starts as his witness.

The night of the basket court he gets drunk, for the first and last time and it’s only Even’s number deleted from his phone that stops him from drunk-dialling him. He calls Adam instead, and Adam comes to pick him up shortly after, bringing him home to his brother.

They hug that night. It’s the first time since Even last touched him that he lets one of the boys hold him.

The shock of being hit in the face stops him from feeling anything at first, but then it’s like a floodgate has been opened. Like a part of him didn’t realise that Even was still alive, because it felt so much like he’d died, and is now trying to catch up on all of the missing him he hasn’t been doing.

The thing he forgot in his grief was how much of a light Even is. How addictive it is to be around him because he’s so kind and so caring and so fun. How everyone in the presence of him will gravitate in his direction because he’s so wonderful to be around.

He saw it, then, at the karaoke place, getting everyone to sing along. And he remembers.

So he texts him. Texts him and texts him and texts him until, eventually, he answers.

And then he asks him to meet up.

*

They’re _so_ close to breaking, him and the boys but, eventually, they don’t.

For two weeks all they do is fight or cry or sit in silence. They have different grieving processes, and they irk each other, and more times than he can count Mikael thinks he’s ready to walk right out of the room, change his phone number, and sign up to uni in fucking Bergen or somewhere where he won’t have to be here, with them; reminded.

For two weeks. But then, one evening, they’re over at the Bakkoush household when Adam has to shut off his phone because it keeps chiming at him.

“It’s that girl,” he says. “The one I was talking to before–” He breaks off. “Uh. Before.”

“The Swedish one?” Elias asks.

“Yeah.”

“What’s she saying?”

“Um.” He grimaces, and Mikael thinks it could be a tear about to fall or it could be his lips, wanting to grin. “I don’t know?”

“You don’t know?” Mikael asks. And then Adam does smile, a little embarrassed, and looks at the floor.

“No. Well,” he says. Glancing up at Mikael he presses his lips together, as if trying to contain a smile. “She’s leaving voicemails and… I don’t actually understand what she’s saying.”

For a long moment, there’s silence. But then:

Mutta is the first to break. He snorts, into the palm of his hand, and then Elias giggles into his hand, too, and then: Then Mikael laughs, out loud and into the room and, a moment later, the rest of them follow.

They keep laughing for far longer than the situation deserves; keep laughing, all of them, until it goes slightly hysteric and, then, until it calms down and leaves them with grins on their faces instead.

It doesn’t become easier after that, allowing each other’s different ways of grieving, but they become gentler with each other, and kinder.

They become more determined to try.

*

The second time he sees Even again he hugs him, tightly, for a long time. Then he yells at him, and hurts him, and doesn’t even care because it makes him feel better and, in a sick sort of way, he thinks that if Even didn’t want to bear the brunt of that, then he should have thought of it earlier. He broke Mikael’s heart, after all.

He goes to Adam’s place that night, crying, like he seems to always be doing, and allows Adam to hold him and hold him and hold him. He cries, first in relief, then from sadness, and then he just cries.

“Please don’t tell him about this,” he says, when he’s done, because he knows, like he knew the first time he and Even really talked, that Even will be a constant in their lives, again, from this moment on. “It’ll break his heart.”

*

It takes him a while before hanging out with Even stops ending in him going home to cry all night from catharsis but, eventually, it does.

The last time it happens is when Even is introducing him to Isak, the funny, sweet boy who’s now his boyfriend, and who Mikael likes a lot, despite himself, because he sees him looking at Even sometimes, when Even isn’t looking, with the fondest look in the world.

Isak likes him back, it seems, almost like they recognise something within each other. Like they’re both people who are made out of their love for Even; like it’s the fabric of their universes and they’ve found someone who’s built the same.

And Even clearly likes Isak, looking more in love than he ever has, wearing that same fond look, shined in Isak’s direction whenever Isak isn’t looking, that Isak wears when he looks at him. They’re tightly knit, the two of them, and Mikael knows pretty quickly that he’s looking at two people who would do anything to be with each other. Devoted like two people who’ve seen the pain of the world and found solace from it, together.

So, that night, when Mikael cries again, it’s because Even is happy and Mikael is happy for him, and because, for once, Even is loved with the devotion he deserves and because, in every expression on him that night, Mikael sees a boy who’s happy to be alive and who will stay that way. Maybe just to spare the people he loves. Maybe just to spare Isak.

It doesn’t matter why. Doesn’t matter at all. The only thing that matters is that it will keep him alive. 

And Mikael really, really thinks it will.

*

It takes them years to talk about it but, eventually, they’re twenty-six and dropped out of their last year of uni to pursue their careers after several of their short-films get recognised and their first feature do well at Cannes, and they’re making a movie about grief when Mikael says, “The first person who made me feel grief was you.”

Mikael is dating Adam, now, who he’s so in love with he doesn’t even know what to do with himself, and who he can’t believe it took him this long to notice, and Even and Isak have been married for a year.

The whole time they were at uni Even went to therapy, once a month instead of once a week and, even now, when they’re stationary long enough for him to do it, he occasionally goes. He hasn’t had an episode for about a year and he hasn’t tried to kill himself since he was eighteen.

Mikael tells Even the whole story that night, and it’s the first time he’s said it out loud to anyone. How angry he was. How sadly, desperately in love and how deeply, deeply in pain. How, even though Even didn’t actually die, his mind sometimes forgets that part and how, even if it didn’t, the grief of almost losing him was just as real as the grief of actually losing him would have been.

It’s been a long time since he cried about it but, that night, he and Even both do. In-between their tears, however, there’s laughter, because the thing about grief is that, sometimes, it’s silly and makes us do silly things. Sometimes, even, it’s funny. And sometimes it breaks your heart, like it does that night, again, too.

The next morning Even helps him look for a therapist and, after a few weeks of late-but-surprisingly-not-too-late grief counselling, Mikael talks to Isak about it and discovers that, even though Isak wasn’t there for all of it, he understands, in a way that very few of the others do. In fact, none of the others do, except for Even himself.

A few months later the movie about grief premieres at Cannes and, in it, the main character’s mother ends up saying this:

“I’m going to be honest with you now, because you’ll find the truth out anyway. Grief will stay with you for the rest of your life. That’s just the way it is and, at times, you will want to revisit grief because, if anything, grief will feel familiar. So it will stay with you forever.

But so will joy. And so will laughter, and so will love, and none of it will mean that your pain doesn’t feel like pain, but it will remind you just how much life is worth living and trust me, darling, that’s a lot. And then, one day, you will realise that you don’t feel sad anymore, that, if you were to pinpoint the main theme of your life, it wouldn’t be grief but glee.

Of course then you’ll feel sad again. 

But that day:

That day will keep coming back, again and again and again and, throughout your whole life, you will keep finding moments where you think, _right now. Right now I’m so happy that my body can’t even contain it and, right now, I am delighted to be a real, feeling, breathing human, who gets to have a life and to live it.”_

*

Once, on a cold October afternoon in their first year of their shared uni experience, they’re sitting in the UiO library when Even says something funny enough to make Mikael laugh in such surprise that he snorts his cocoa out of his nose which, consequently, makes Even laugh with him and then they’re just two boys sitting in a library, giggling their heads off.

They get thrown out of the room by an angry librarian, and that makes them laugh even more and then they’re outside, under the starry sky. Even stops in his tracks to watch it.

“I like the stars this time of year,” he says, and Mikael looks at him. Looks and looks and looks, and then he smiles.

“Makes you happy to be alive, doesn’t it?” he says. When Even glances back down to him, he’s smiling.

It’s Mikael who opens his arms first, in question, and Even who steps into them to hold him tight, rubbing his back. Mikael’s nose is cold but Even’s shoulder is warm when he presses it to it and he loves Even, so he says it:

“I love you.”

Oh, Mik,” Even says, “I love you, too,” and then, pulling away from him to send him a grin, warm and light and _happy_ :

“And yes.” He nods, squeezes Mikael’s shoulder, and is smiling. “It does.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! talk to me in the comments?


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